Wednesday, November 29, 2017

Cribs

Students at The Boston Public Latin School of the 1960s were expected to keep up with their lessons, learning Latin enough to translate without the use of a crib. Accordingly, cribs were always a matter of high drama and trepidation, as they were the ultimate contraband. The cheating student, tearing out the day's translation and laying it into his Cicero or Virgil, would rise to recite. Stammering his way through, he trembled, responding n-nothing to the master's (pointing) What's that you've got there? There was no greater punishment than that for the use, or even possession, of a crib: the student's parents summoned to the headmaster, suspension or disciplinary censure following (two censures in a school year and you were out). For it was not simply cheating, it was treason—a betrayal of the core educational values and good citizenship embodied in the study of Latin at the Latin School. The severity of the sanction, the opprobrium, kept us well studied and respectful.

An image of the inscription, from Troels Myrup Kristensen, Making and Breaking the Gods: Christian Responses to Pagan Sculpture in Late Antiquity (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2013 = Aarhus Studies in
Mediterranean Antiquity, XII), p. 10:

Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Reformers

But the obstacle and the difficulty is,
that these Reformers make
a great issue out of everything.
(A blessing it would be if nobody
ever needed them.) They examine
and inquire about the slightest little thing,
and they set their mind immediately on radical reforms,
demanding that these be executed without delay.

Monday, November 27, 2017

Mutilation

Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World (London: Macmillan, 2017), pp. 103-104, with notes on p. 280:

Go to Room 18 in the
British Museum in London and you will find yourself in front of the Parthenon Marbles, taken from
Greece by Lord Elgin in the nineteenth century. The astonishingly lifelike statues are, today, in a sorry
state: many are mutilated or missing limbs. This, it is often assumed, was the fault of Lord Elgin's clumsy
workmen or fighting during the Ottoman occupation. And indeed some of this was — but not all. Much was
the work of zealous Christians who set about the temple with blunt instruments, attacking the 'demonic'
gods, mutilating some of the finest statuary Greece had ever produced.1

The East Pediment fared particularly badly. Hands, feet, even whole limbs have gone — almost
certainly smashed off by Christians trying to incapacitate the demons within. The vast majority of the gods
have been decapitated — again, almost certainly the work of Christians. The great central figures of the
Pediment, that would have shown the birth of Athena, were the most sacred — and thus to the Christians
the most demonic. They therefore suffered most: it is likely that they were pushed off the Pediment and
smashed on the ground below, their fragmented remains ground down and used for mortar for a Christian
church.

The same tale is told by objects in museums and archaeological sites across the world. Near the
Marbles in the same museum is a basalt bust of Germanicus. Two blows have hacked off his nose and a
cross has been cut in his forehead. In Athens, a larger-than-life statue of Aphrodite has been disfigured by
a crude cross carved on her brow; her eyes have been defaced and her nose is missing.2 In Cyrene, the
eyes have been gouged out of a life-sized bust in a sanctuary of Demeter, and the nose removed; in
Tuscany a slender statue of Bacchus has been decapitated. In the Sparta Archaeological Museum, a
colossal statue of the goddess Hera looks blindly out, her eyes disfigured by crosses. A beautiful statue of
Apollo from Salamis has been castrated and then struck, hard, in the face, shearing off the god's nose.
Across his neck are scars indicating that Christians attempted to decapitate him but failed. In Palmyra
Museum there stood, at least until the city's recent occupation by Islamic State, the mutilated and
reconstructed figure of the once-great figure of Athena that had dominated a temple there. A huge dent in
her once-handsome face was all that remained when her nose was smashed off. A recent book on the
Christian destruction of statues focussing just on Egypt and the Near East runs to almost three hundred
pages, dense with pictures of mutilation.3

Waxing and Waning

Thus the sum of things is ever being renewed, and mortal creatures live dependent one upon another. Some species increase, others diminish, and in a short space the generations of living creatures are changed and, like runners, pass on the torch of life.

Getting to the Heart of the Matter

Nicholas Horsfall, The Epic Distilled: Studies in the Composition of the Aeneid (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 1:

In
modern Rome, in the spring, if you want to buy an artichoke, a carciofo
(also good Italian for 'blockhead'), you carry off from your chosen
market stall a delectable little jewel, neatly trimmed and edible in all its
parts:1 the outer leaves have been removed, the base trimmed, and the
choke, anyway very small in a young carciofo, has also been removed.
Steam, dress, eat. In Britain, however, the patient feeder removes a
couple of leaves from the cooked artichoke (a large, mature specimen,
inevitably), dips them in vinaigrette and sucks off a tiny quantity of
succulent flesh from the base of the leaves. As you proceed towards the
centre, the quantity does increase, noticeably. But then progress comes
to a complete halt, as you have to detach every trace of the inedible
choke (ital., 'barba', beard). Now at last you have reached the delectable
'heart'. A quarter of a century ago, I thought that this long, slow
struggle was not bad as a metaphor for our struggle to reach the heart
of a difficult passage in the Aeneid. It still seems not bad at all.

Friday, November 24, 2017

Si Quid Mali, in Pyrrham

An example of epipompē in a proverb, from Erasmus, Adages II vii 1 to III iii 100, translated and annotated by R.A.B. Mynors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), p. 224 (III ii 1, with end omitted), plus notes on p. 389:

Si quid mali, in Pyrrham
If there's anything bad, on Pyrrha's head

Εἴ τι κακόν, εἰς Πύρραν, If there's anything wrong, on Pyrrha's head — we must understand 'be it' or 'let it fall,' or something of the kind. In this way, if they feared some impending evil, they sought to avoid it by turning it aside, and prayed that it might fall on their enemy's head. Hence too that form of words well known in both Greek and Latin authors, 'May this befall our enemies.' Ovid:1 'Would that such parties might befall our foes.' Again, in book three of the Art of Love: 'May cause of such foul shame befall my foes'; in book three of the Fasti: 'Would that that colour might befall my foes'; in book two of the Elegies: 'Sleep in an empty bed befall my foes! And let my foes live such a Spartan life!' and again in book three: 'Such cause for shame befall my enemies!' Virgil2 too in book three of the Georgics: 'May the gods send good men a better fate, And send that error on our enemies!' and in the eighth Aeneid, speaking of Mezentius: 'May the gods keep this in store for him and for his race.' Propertius:3 'May a cold-blooded wench await my foes!' And Horace4 in the Odes: 'Let enemies' wives and children feel / The gathering south-wind's angry roar.' And Terence5 in the Heautontimorumenos, that is, the old self-tormentor 'Oh dear! I do beseech you, let that be for your enemies,' and again in the Eunuchus: 'Would that all those who wish me ill were in the same plight.'

The traditional origin of the proverb is as follows. In old days the people of Pyrrha were intensely unpopular with all their neighbours, with the result
that if they ever saw trouble threatening, they sought to avoid it by praying that it might fall on the Pyrrhaeans instead, saying 'On Pyrrha's head be it!'

[Notes]

In 1508 this stood after what is now III ii 7; it was moved here in 1515. The basis is a translation of Zenobius 4.2.

1 Ovid] Heroides 15.217, already used in II iii 11 and added in 1515 to III ii 78; Ars
amatoria 3.247; Fasti 3.494; Amores 2.10.16-17 in reverse order; 3.11.16. The first
of these is of 1508, the other four of 1533.

2 Virgil] Georgics 3.513; Aeneid 8.484, both of 1533

3 Propertius] 3.8.20, added in 1533

4 Horace] Odes 3.27.21-2 (trans Conington); this is of 1508, and had already appeared in II iii 11.

5 Terence] Heautontimorumenos 1015, added in 1517/8 with the title of the play
given in Latin. In 1533 Erasmus inserted the usual form of it, and appended
Eunuchus 655.

Wednesday, November 22, 2017

Deaths and Births

With the funeral dirge is mingled the wail that children raise when they first see the borders of light; and no night ever followed day, or dawn followed night, that has not heard mingled with their sickly wailings the lamentations that attend upon death and the black funeral.

Growing Old

Montaigne, Essays 3.2 (On Repenting; tr. M.A. Screech):

What we call wisdom is
the moroseness of our humours and our distaste for things as they are
now. But in truth we do not so much give up our vices as change them —
for the worse, if you ask me. Apart from silly tottering pride, boring
babble, prickly unsociable humours, superstition and a ridiculous
concern for wealth when we have lost the use of it, I find that there are
more envy and unfairness and malice; age sets more wrinkles on our
minds than on our faces. You can find no souls — or very few — which as
they grow old do not stink of rankness and of rot.

The Voice of Blood

Genesis 4.10:

The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground.

Aeschylus, Libation Bearers 400-404 (tr. Alan H. Sommerstein):

Well, it is certainly the law that when drops of gore
flow to the ground, they demand other
blood; for slaughter cries out for a Fury
who comes from those who perished before to bring
further ruin upon ruin.

Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Fearfully Different

Reflections of a Statesman: The Writings and Speeches of Enoch Powell (London: Bellew, 1991), p. 98:

They were different,
fearfully different, these Greeks, whose voices we could still hear and (at a
pinch) understand. What had we in the vast, sprawling suburbs of Sydney with
the gardens and the poinsettias and jacarandas, that would deserve their envy
rather than their contempt?

How to Become a Novelist

I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to
become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the
profession, he asked me to tell him how he should
set to work to realize his ambition. I did my best
to explain. 'The first thing,' I said, 'is to buy
quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen.
After that you merely have to write.'

Monday, November 20, 2017

Result of a Google Search

Sunday, November 19, 2017

A Textual Pervert

Simon Heffer, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell (London: Faber & Faber, 2014), chapter 2 (page number unknown):

[A.P.] Treweek recalled that 'his scholarly achievements
were very strong, but of narrow interest. He found faults in Greek texts where
there were none. He couldn't read a page without finding mistakes — so much so
that at times he was referred to as a textual pervert.'140

Introduction to Byzantine Thought

To become familiar with Byzantine popular thought it is essential to remember that
the East Roman Christian knew and believed his New Testament; he read it or heard
it read in church; it became a part of his life. Thus for the modern student the most
useful introduction to Byzantine thought is perhaps to re-read the New Testament.

Saturday, November 18, 2017

The New Worship

The ruin of the Pagan religion is described by the sophists as a dreadful and amazing prodigy, which covered the earth with darkness, and restored the ancient dominion of chaos and of night. They relate, in solemn and pathetic strains, that the temples were converted into sepulchres, and that the holy places, which had been adorned by the statues of the gods, were basely polluted by the relics of Christian martyrs. "The monks" (a race of filthy animals, to whom Eunapius is tempted to refuse the name of men) "are the authors of the new worship, which, in the place of those deities who are conceived by the understanding, has substituted the meanest and most contemptible slaves. The heads, salted and pickled, of those infamous malefactors, who for the multude of their crimes have suffered a just and ignominious death; their bodies, still marked by the impression of the lash, and the scars of those tortures which were inflicted by the sentence of the magistrate; such" (continues Eunapius) "are the gods which the earth produces in our days; such are the martyrs, the supreme arbitrators of our prayers and petitions to the Deity, whose tombs are now consecrated as the objects of the veneration of the people."

Next, into the sacred places they imported monks, as they called them, who were men in appearance but led the lives of swine, and openly did and allowed countless unspeakable crimes. But this they accounted piety, to show contempt for things divine. For in those days every man who wore a black robe and consented to behave in unseemly fashion in public, possessed the power of a tyrant, to such a pitch of virtue had the human race advanced! All this however I have described in my Universal History. They settled these monks at Canobus also, and thus they fettered the human race to the worship of slaves, and those not even honest slaves, instead of the true gods. For they collected the bones and skulls of criminals who had been put to death for numerous crimes, men whom the law courts of the city had condemned to punishment, made them out to be gods, haunted their sepulchres, and thought that they became better by defiling themselves at their graves. "Martyrs" the dead men were called, and "ministers" of a sort, and "ambassadors" from the gods to carry men's prayers,—these slaves in vilest servitude, who had been consumed by stripes and carried on their phantom forms the scars of their villainy. However these are the gods that earth produces!

Following the Crowd

Seneca, On the Happy Life 1.3-4 (tr. John Davie):

Accordingly, the most important point to stress is that we should
not, like sheep, follow the herd of creatures in front of us, making our
way where others go, not where we ought to go. And yet there is
nothing that brings greater trouble on us than the fact that we conform to rumour, thinking that what has won widespread approval is
best, and that, as we have so many to follow as good, we live by the
principle, not of reason, but of imitation. What follows from this is
that men are piled high, one on top of another, as they rush to their
ruin.

Just as it happens that in a great crowd of humanity that is
crushed together, when the people jostle against each other, no one
falls without dragging someone else down with him, and the ones in
front bring destruction on the ones behind, so you may see the same
thing happening throughout all of life. No one who goes astray affects
himself alone, but rather will be the cause and instigator of someone
else going astray; it is harmful to attach oneself to the people in front,
and, so long as each one of us prefers to trust someone else's judgement rather than relying on his own, we never exercise judgement in
our lives but constantly resort to trust, and a mistake that has been
passed down from one hand to another takes us over and spins our
ruin. It is the example of others that destroys us: we will regain our
health, if only we distance ourselves from the crowd.

True Stories

'Well, now,' said Reuben, with decisive earnestness, 'that sort o' coarse touch that's so upsetting to Ann's feelings is to my mind a recommendation; for it do always prove a story to be true. And for the same reason, I like a story with a bad moral. My sonnies, all true stories have a coarse touch or a bad moral, depend upon't.'

Whereas many benefits can accrue to people with a serious interest in education from speaking Greek, it has been jointly determined by the three of us, Aldus the Roman, John the Cretan and thirdly myself, Scipione Forteguerri, to pass a law that they should not speak to each other except in Greek. If any of us, whether deliberately or without thinking, talks in another language, forgetting this law or for some other reason, he shall be fined one small coin for each occasion on which he happens to do this. But there shall not be a penalty for solecism, unless someone does that too deliberately.

When enough money from fines has accumulated, it is to be spent on a party (§ 4, p. 291). A very interesting document. I noticed a typographical error on p. 320, where the title mistakenly appears as Statues of the New Academy.

A modern reincarnation of the New Academy is the educational Stammtisch, where only German is spoken.

Thursday, November 16, 2017

A County Motto?

The county motto is "dolorem et dolor liberum" which is Latin for "pain and suffering are free" which was an epigram of the first century BC Roman Senator Marcus Tullius Cicero and a favorite saying of one of the county's founders.

Screen capture:

The words "dolorem et dolor liberum" are all Latin words but make no sense when taken together. The phrase doesn't occur in the works of Cicero, so far as I can tell, or in any other Latin writer. See e.g.
H. Merguet, Handlexikon zu Cicero (Leipzig: Dieterich, 1905), s.v. dolor, pp. 212-213.

Update (November 20, 2017): The sentence has been removed from the web page.

Dedication

DEDICATION.
TO
the Red-Headed Cerberus, regardant between the Pont Royal and
the Petit-Pont; to the Frothing Vorticist; to the Harpy behind
the Little Grille; to the Bilious but Gaitered Platonic; to
the Surgical, Hairy, yet invisible Troll of the Dieppois; to
the Stout Love-Child of the Pierides who Believes Aquinas
to be a Mineral-Water; to the Bouncing Benthamite of
Bloomsbury who is Unaware of the Medieval; to That
Other, the Cramoisy One; to the Dodging Lutheran
of the Rue de Grenelle; to the Pythoness of Bays-
water; to the Commandant of Infantry who Babbled
of the Grand-Orient; to the Lady with the Hard
Grey Eyes; to the Levantine of London who Did
Not Think Poetry Would Do; to the Military
Character who Sacked the Lot; and to all pratt-
ling Gablers, sycophant Varlets, forlorn Snakes,
blockish Grutnols, fondling Fops, doddi-
pol Joltheads, slutch Calf-Lollies, cods-
head Loobies, jobernol Goosecaps,
grout-head Gnat-Snappers, noddie-
peak Simpletons, Lob-Dotterels,
and ninniehammer
Flycatchers,
THIS,
IN DERISION.

Some of this is borrowed from Urquhart's translation of Rabelais, Book I, Chapter XXV.

Dear Mike,

Robert G. Eisenhauer's Archeologies of Invective (Peter Lang, 2007) quotes the Villon dedication, identifying the "Red-Headed Cerberus" as Ezra Pound and the "Frothing Vorticist" as Wyndham Lewis. Unfortunately he fails to realize that there are two Wyndham Lewises, and that the Wyndham Lewis who wrote Villon is not the Vorticist. He is therefore obliged to invent an elaborate scenario to explain away the dedication (p. 22):

As the dedicatory language makes clear, the derogatory connotation of "blackguards both" is negated in the affirmation of an avant-garde which includes both himself and Ezra Pound. Thus the "slings and arrows" become epithets of highest praise. Lewis's elaborate, Vergilian, Henrysonian characterization of Pound on the dedication page of his study exemplifies the chaffing owed by one avant-garde "good fella" to another, an intemperance studied from Villon and Dunbar and made new in the context of Vorticist assaults on academic self-satisfaction.

Incidentally, "the Bilious but Gaitered Platonic" is obviously Dean Inge.

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Lowbrow and Highbrow

There was a time, not so long ago, when the
stupid and uneducated aspired to be thought intelligent and cultured. The current of aspiration
has changed its direction. It is not at all uncommon
now to find intelligent and cultured people doing
their best to feign stupidity and to conceal the fact
that they have received an education. Twenty
years ago it was still a compliment to say of a
man that he was clever, cultivated, interested in
the things of the mind. To-day 'highbrow' is
a term of contemptuous abuse.

Id. (at 207-208):

A man who is exclusively
interested in the things of the mind will be quite
happy (in Pascal's phrase) sitting quietly in a room.
A man who has no interest in the things of the
mind will be bored to death if he has to sit quietly in a room.

Un-Greek

What is un-Greek in Christianity. The Greeks did not see the Homeric gods above them as masters and themselves below them as servants, as did the Jews. They saw, as it were, only the reflection of the most successful specimens of their own caste, that is, an ideal, not a contrast to their own nature. They felt related to them, there was a reciprocal interest, a kind of symmachia. Man thinks of himself as noble when he gives himself such gods, and puts himself into a relationship similar to that of the lesser nobility to the higher. Whereas the Italic peoples have a regular peasant religion, with continual fearfulness about evil and capricious powers and tormentors. Where the Olympian gods retreated, there Greek life too grew gloomier and more fearful.

Christianity, on the other hand, crushed and shattered man completely, and submerged him as if in deep mire. Then, all at once, into his feeling of complete confusion, it allowed the light of divine compassion to shine, so that the surprised man, stunned by mercy, let out a cry of rapture, and thought for a moment that he carried all of heaven within him. All psychological inventions of Christianity work toward this sick excess of feeling, toward the deep corruption of head and heart necessary for it. Christianity wants to destroy, shatter, stun, intoxicate: there is only one thing it does not want: moderation, and for this reason, it is in its deepest meaning barbaric, Asiatic, ignoble, un-Greek.

I Came Here to Work

Simon Heffer, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell (London: Faber & Faber, 2014), chapter 2 (page number unknown):

Shortly after arriving at Trinity at the start of Michaelmas Term 1930, Powell
was found by Henry Jamieson, his fellow Edwardian, sitting on packing cases in
his room reading a Greek text. 'Come and have some tea‚' Jamieson said.
'Thank you very much‚' Powell replied, 'but I came here to work.'1

On the Imitation of Dog

For as hounds very often find by their scent the leaf-hidden resting-place of the mountain-ranging quarry, when once they have hit upon certain traces of its path, so will you be able for yourself to see one thing after another in such matters as these, and to penetrate all unseen hiding-places, and draw forth the truth from them.

Holy Writ

Ezra Pound, letter to Harriet Monroe (July 16, 1922):

Say that I consider the Writings of Confucius, and Ovid's Metamorphoses the only safe guides in religion. This doesn't repudiate 'The G<oodly> F<ere>'. Christ can very well stand as an heroic figure. The hero need not be of wisdom all compounded. Also he is not wholly to blame for the religion that's been foisted on to him. As well blame me for ... for all the bunk in vers libre.

Christianity as practised resumes itself into one commandment dear to all officials, American Y.M.C.A., burocrats, etc., 'Thou shalt attend to thy neighbor's business before attending to thine own.'

In your footnote you ought to point out that I refuse to accept ANY monotheistic taboos whatsoever. That I consider the Metamorphoses a sacred book, and the Hebrew scriptures the record of a barbarian tribe, full of evil.

Monday, November 13, 2017

German

Reflections of a Statesman: The Writings and Speeches of Enoch Powell (London: Bellew, 1991), p. 104:

I remember, as sharply as Keats recalled first looking into
Chapman's Homer, the moment — it must have been in 1927 — when I opened my first German book. Here was the language I had dreamt of but never knew existed: sharp, hard, strict but with words which were romance in themselves, words in which poetry and music vibrated together.

Powell, The Observer (April 24, 1968):

The happiest and most glorious hours of my life
with books have been with German books.

Culture-Fans and Erudition-Snobs

What readers has the Divine Comedy
now? A few poets, a few lovers of poetry, a few
strayed cross-word puzzlers, and, for the rest, a
diminishing band of culture-fans and erudition-snobs. These last feel as triumphantly superior in
their exclusive learning as would the social snob if,
alone of all his acquaintance, he had met the Prince
of Wales, or could speak of Mr. Michael Arlen by
his pet name.

I don't have access to Ronald E. Pepin, ed. and tr., Scorn for the World: Bernard of Cluny's De Contemptu Mundi (East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1991), so the line numbers above come from an online version. I haven't yet read Books II and III (please don't send supplements).
For similar lines in Greek and Latin poetry see:

Revolutionaries

Clemenceau: The Events of His Life as Told by Himself to His Former Secretary Jean Martet. Translated by Milton Waldman (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1930), pp. 195-196:

The revolutionary of that model is generally a failure
who hasn't been able to succeed in anything within the
ordinary framework of Society by the normal and legal
means which it has established, so he tells himself that by
dragging Society into the mud, he will be able to profit
from the resulting mess. He is quite a pretentious being,
with a very high idea of himself, who, on beginning life,
expected to reach the top immediately, at one stroke,
thanks to his abilities, his eloquence and various other
things of that kind. He perceived presently that, as far
as the top is concerned, he is no more than the tram conductor or the street-sweeper. He concludes from this
that there is no justice, or, if there is, it doesn't favour
him—like everything else. They're fools, but fools who
haven't much more courage than the bourgeois—and,
good God! that's little enough.

It's ideas that give a man courage, and your revolutionaries are as gifted with ideas as my boot. They have
spite, bitterness—but that doesn't get one very far. I saw
them during the war; I have talked with them and tried
to find something in them; it was pathetic.

Homer's Interpreter Nods

There were six of them, the best and bravest of the hero's companions. Turning back from his post in the bows, Odysseus was in time to see them lifted, struggling, into the air, to hear their screams, the desperate repetition of his own name. The survivors could only look on, helplessly, while Scylla 'at the mouth of her cave devoured them, still screaming, still stretching out their hands to me in the frightful struggle.' And Odysseus adds that it was the most dreadful and lamentable sight he ever saw in all his 'explorings of the passes of the sea.' We can believe it; Homer's brief description (the too poetical simile is a later interpolation) convinces us.

Later, the danger passed, Odysseus and his men went ashore for the night, and, on the Sicilian beach, prepared their supper—prepared it, says Homer, 'expertly.' The Twelfth Book of the Odyssey concludes with these words: 'When they had satisfied their thirst and hunger, they thought of their dear companions and wept, and in the midst of their tears sleep came gently upon them.'

The Twelfth Book of the Odyssey does not conclude with those words. Those words (plus others — Huxley has abridged the quotation) occur at Odyssey 12.308-312, and the book has 453 lines in all.

Update from Joel Eidsath:

A strange error, as the quotations appear to be Huxley's own translation.

The essay was published twice in Spring 1931, once in the Virginia Quarterly, and a shorter version in The Spectator.

The Spectator version is more accurate "The story in the XIIth Book of the Odyssey ends with these words..." That is, the story of Charybdis and Scylla ended with those words, not the XIIth book of the Odyssey.

The Spectator version appears to be a trimmed version of the first, no doubt prepared by Huxley himself. Perhaps Huxley's error was pointed out to him immediately after publication of the first version. Or perhaps the Spectator version is Huxley's original statement. Another vexing textual question in Homeric scholarship.

Saturday, November 11, 2017

Golden Rule

He used often to exclaim what he had heard from someone, either a Jew or a Christian, and always remembered, and he also had it announced by a herald whenever he was disciplining anyone, "What you do not wish that a man should do to you, do not do to him." And so highly did he value this sentiment that he had it written up in the Palace and in public buildings.

Wretched man, why are you proud,
you who are made of earth?
You brought no garment here,
but came poor and naked.
When your soul has gone out,
and your body is covered over with earth,
that body that was so confident and loud-mouthed
is hated by all men.

I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. I cannot march up and down
their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience. You need not
fear any of that. Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates
that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with wood dust, the floor
covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing
daylight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to
share with me a bit of the mood—certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather,
one of anticipation—which these books arouse in a genuine collector.

Id. (at 486-487):

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, which suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books. For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order? You have all heard of people whom the loss of their books has turned into invalids, or of those who in order to acquire books became criminals. These are the very areas in which any order is nothing more than a hovering above the abyss. "The only exact knowledge there is," said Anatole France, "is the knowledge of the date of publication and the format of books." And indeed, if there is a counterpart to the
confusion of a library, it is the order of its catalogue.

Thus, the life of a collector manifests a dialectical tension between the
poles of disorder and order.

Id. (at 487):

Habent sua fata libelli. These words may
have been intended as a general statement about books. So books like The
Divine Comedy, Spinoza's Ethics, and The Origin of Species have their fates. A collector, however, interprets this Latin saying differently. For him, not only books but also copies of books have their fates. And in this sense, the most important fate of a copy is its encounter with him, with his own collection. I am not exaggerating when I say that to a true collector the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth.

Id. (at 492):

Now I am on the last half-emptied crate, and it is way past midnight. Other thoughts fill me than the ones I am talking about—not thoughts but images, memories. Memories of the cities in which I found so many things: Riga, Naples, Munich, Danzig, Moscow, Florence, Basel, Paris; memories of Rosenthal's sumptuous rooms in Munich, of the Danzig Stockturm, where the late Hans Rhaue was domiciled, of Süssengut's musty book cellar in North Berlin; memories of the rooms where these books had been housed, of my student's den in Munich, of my room in Bern, of the solitude of lseltwald on the Lake of Brienz, and finally of my boyhood room, the former location of only four or five of the several thousand volumes that are piled up around me. O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure! No one has had less expected of him and no one has had a greater sense of well-being than the man who has been able to carry on his disreputable existence in the guise of Spitzweg's "Bookworm." For inside him there are spirits, or at least little genii, which have seen to it that for a collector—and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be—ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to things. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. So I have erected before you one of his dwellings, with books as the building stones; and now he is going to disappear inside, as is only fitting.

Carl Spitzweg (1808-1885), The Bookworm

Hat tip: Eric Thomson, who remarked, "Melancholy to think of the final dwelling the author disappeared inside, in Portbou in Catalonia, far from his books."

Heathen Books

But avoid all books of the heathen. For what hast thou to do with strange sayings or laws or lying prophecies, which also turn away from the faith them that are young? For what is wanting to thee in the word of God, that thou shouldst cast thyself upon these fables of the heathen? If thou wouldst read historical narratives, thou hast the Book of Kings; but if wise men and philosophers, thou hast the Prophets, wherein thou shalt find wisdom and understanding more than that of the wise men and philosophers; for they are the words of the one God, the only wise. And if thou wish for songs, thou hast the Psalms of David; but if (thou wouldst read of) the beginning of the world, thou hast the Genesis of the great Moses; and if laws and commandments, thou hast the glorious Law of the Lord God. All strange (writings) therefore, which are contrary (to these), wholly avoid.

(NIMMERWAHR, 1868) Niemand's suggested emendation, as well as his translation based on it, will plainly not do; among other things, the plain uninterpretability of the text, which alone constitutes its significance, is thereby beclouded.

(NIRGENDSWO, 1869) The text is quite clear, and if seemingly "uninterpretable" (thus Nimmerwahr!), only because it is merely so much a commonplace as to be trivial. Niemand's conjecture is, of course, quite sound.

(STILLSCHWEIGEND, 1870) Sound? Sound!!!??? A ridiculous suggestion, all the more dangerous in that it invites the ill-considered judgment to agree with the reductively positive Schwartzweiss, who is, as always, incapable of grasping critical nuance.

(LINDSAY-WOLSEY, 1902) There is something uncanny about Niemand's suggested syllable, which represents, after all, the only intelligible morpheme in the inscription; it is, in the Eastwest dialect, the word for "life." Niemand of course knew nothing of this, and his suggestion is as worthless as is the controversy it has elicited. Still, the very fact that he should have introduced it, sheds some ironic light not on the "meaning" of the text but on the meaning of the conditions generating its mode of reception.

(QUACKENBUSH, 1973) The very power of this fragment to elicit such particularly heavy and humorless debate from nineteenth-century German scholars usually known for their light-handedness and grace in controversy is in some way a function of the resonance of its assertion, particularly in view of the fact that it is now believed to be impossible to assert just what that assertion might be. I am reminded of how ...

(BERTOLDO, 1974) Quackenbush leads us—ha! ha!—into a quackmire. The text says what it says; the English translation from Niemand will do as well as any.

(PETERSCHREIER, 1988) Merely to quote this sentiment [Niemand's "We are all born and we all die." Ed.] is outrageous. We??? This means, as usual, humans, and the whole utterance manifests the worst sort of species-ism. The assertion is an affront to other species who can't be said to "know" that they will die. It is a slippery slope from boasting of the ultimate human knowledge to asserting, vilely, mankind's hegemony over "the garden of Creation."

(VRUN-LÜGNER, 1990) As we now know, Niemand went wrong in not realizing that the inscription falls into two parts that are actually in two different dialects; EIDLLA EW is in the lingua franca of the North, and NROBLLA ERAEW in the form used for inscriptions in the South. Whatever the words may mean, each "half" is a paraphrase of the other. Each says the same thing. Whether, at some level, Niemand's erroneous translation might be a tautology is not for us to consider.

Thursday, November 09, 2017

Our Dear Old Culture-Aunties and Uncles

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), "On the Charms of History and the Future of the Past," Music at Night and Other Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1949; rpt. 1957), pp. 133-153 (at 134-135):

Culture, as Emmanuel Berl has pointed out in
one of his brilliantly entertaining pamphlets, is like
the sum of special knowledge that accumulates in
any large united family and is the common property
of all its members. 'Do you remember Aunt
Agatha's ear trumpet? And how Willie made the
parrot drunk with sops in wine? And that picnic
on Loch Etive, when the boat upset and Uncle
Bob was nearly drowned? Do you remember?'
And we all do; and we laugh delightedly; and
the unfortunate stranger, who happens to have
called, feels utterly out of it. Well, that (in its
social aspect) is Culture. When we of the great
Culture Family meet, we exchange reminiscences
about Grandfather Homer, and that awful old
Dr. Johnson, and Aunt Sappho, and poor Johnny
Keats. 'And do you remember that absolutely
priceless thing Uncle Virgil said? You know.
Timeo Danaos ... Priceless; I shall never forget
it.' No, we shall never forget it; and what
more, we shall take good care that those horrid
people who have had the impertinence to call on
us, those wretched outsiders who never knew dear
mellow old Uncle V., shall never forget it either.
We'll keep them constantly reminded of their
outsideness. So pleasurable to members of the
Culture Family is this rehearsal of tribal gossip,
such a glow of satisfied superiority does it give
them, that the Times finds it profitable to employ
some one to do nothing else but talk to us every
morning about our dear old Culture-Aunties and
Uncles and their delightful friends.

18. Bonaventura, On Removing the Word Not from the Ten Commandments, and adding it to the Apostles' Creed.

21. The Judges' Handbook, containing the many confessions of poisoners given to Justice Manwood, and used by him afterwards in wiping his buttocks, and in examining his evacuations; now recovered from his servants, and gathered together for his own use, by John Hele.

The prying republic of which a great school consists, soon found me out: there was no shifting the blame any longer upon other people's shoulders,—no good-natured maid to take upon herself the enormities of which I stood accused in the article of bread and butter, besides the crying sin of stolen ends of puddings, and cold pies strangely missing. The truth was but too manifest in my looks,—in the evident signs of inanition which I exhibited after the fullest meals, in spite of the double allowance which my master was privately instructed by my kind parents to give me. The sense of the ridiculous, which is but too much alive in grown persons, is tenfold more active and alert in boys. Once detected, I was the constant butt of their arrows,—the mark against which every puny leveller directed his little shaft of scorn. The very Graduses and Thesauruses were raked for phrases to pelt me with by the tiny pedants. Ventri natus,—Ventri deditus,—Vesana gula,—Escarum gurges,—Dapibus indulgens,—Non dans froena gulae,—Sectans lautae fercula mensae, resounded wheresoever I past. I lead a weary life, suffering the penalties of guilt for that which was no crime, but only following the blameless dictates of nature. The remembrance of those childish reproaches haunts me yet oftentimes in my dreams.

Messius' Four-Horse Team

Do not, therefore, wholly follow the rules of Latin style,
that is, the Quadriga of Messius,41 when you are convinced of
the authority of ancient codices; for upon occasion it is advantageous to overlook the idioms of human speech and to observe
instead the criterion of divine communication.

41 Arusianus Messius (ca. A.D. 395). His work is so called (= "the four-horse team") because it contains examples of style taken from Terence, Vergil, Cicero, and
Sallust.

Tuesday, November 07, 2017

Vision of Peace

Historia Augusta, 28: Life of Probus 20.5-6 (tr. David Magie):

"Soon," he said, "we shall have no need of soldiers." What else is this than saying: "Soon there will not be a Roman soldier? Everywhere the commonwealth will reign and will rule all in safety. The entire world will forge no arms and will furnish no rations, the ox will be kept for the plough and the horse be bred for peace, there will be no wars and no captivity, in all places peace will reign, in all places the laws of Rome, and in all places our judges."

Monday, November 06, 2017

The Highest Form of Life

Louis John Paetow, paraphrase of John of Garland, Morale Scolarium, chapter XII (In Praise of the Modest Life of Scholars), in "Morale Scolarium of John of Garland (Johannes of Garlandia), a Professor in the Universities of Paris and Toulouse in the Thirteenth Century," Memoirs of the University of California 4.2 (1927) 69-273 (at 162-163):

Jesus Christ, blessed son of holy Mary, guide and companion of life, excellent judge, avenger of Uriah, come to the assistance of poor scholars, you who have pity on the poor, who suffer the strong to fall ill and who heal the sick. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, penetrating into our inmost thoughts,
govern us. Son of Mary, light of the sea, O Christ, with supernal power, take away from us the persecutions of the world, visit the humble lodgings of harried students, the firstborn of Egypt, thou who dost shine in the glory of the clergy. The poor scholar is overcome by study, not deprived of virtue; moreover, the rich man, who does not study and who lives in his high houses, gives poor scholars the heehaws and even blows. I eat sparingly in my little room, not high up in a castle; I have no silver money, nor do the Fates give me estates. Beets, beans, and peas are here looked upon as fine
dishes, and we joke about meat which is not on our menu for a very good reason. The size of the bottle of wine on the table depends on the burse which is never large, and which is the weekly statement of expenditure made on oath. Intellectual virtue becomes potent only when it is followed by active or customary virtue which deserves reward because it leads to good works. This scholastic life is the highest form of life; it gives boys such a cleansing of mind and of body that these erstwhile dummies can explain the causes of eclipses of sun and moon, what keeps the sea within bounds, by what force the earth is rent asunder in earthquakes, whence come hail,
snow, rain, and lightning, and what makes the days long in summer and short in winter.

La Plus Richa Joya Qui Al Mont Sia

Surprisingly the Latin occupation of Constantinople and the Aegean did not contribute significantly to the knowledge of the classics in the west. There were signs of an interest in Greek manuscripts on the part of a few exceptional scholars like William, a monk of St Denys who brought codices from Constantinople in 1167, but teachers and manuscripts in Greek were in short supply in the west in the twelfth century. Those involved in the sack of Constantinople in 1204 were not classical scholars; their concern was for precious metals and reliquaries and clearly libraries were not spared in their search for loot. Byzantine scholars of the late twelfth century like Eustathios of Thessalonika, Michael Choniates and John Tzetzes, a schoolmaster from Constantinople, had all read texts which disappeared forever in 1204, like works by Callimachus and Hipponax. Manuscript hunters from Italy did not tour the Aegean until the fifteenth century, but a modest start was made from a quite unexpected quarter, namely the diocese of Lincoln in England. When he became bishop in 1235 Robert Grosseteste (c. 1168-1253) was just getting into his stride as a Greek scholar. Both the chronicler Matthew Paris and the friar Roger Bacon described how the bishop gathered scholars and texts around him to assist in his translations of Greek theological works and, later, Aristotle's Nichomachaean Ethics. John of Basingstoke (d. 1252), who had visited Athens in the early thirteenth century, was made archdeacon of Leicester within months of his election. It may well have been he who stimulated the sending to foreign parts for scholars. Bacon stated that there were many Greeks in England and France at this time but only a very few who taught Greek correctly. Two of these 'veri Graeci' were in the Grosseteste circle — Robert Graecus and a magister Nicholas Graecus who seems to have been a clerk connected with the Abbey of St Albans which presented him to the church of Datchet (Bucks.) in 1239 and who in 1246 became a canon in Lincoln. Apart from the translation work, the 'Parcioarium', a Graeco-Latin lexicon, which made much use of the Suda in the bishop's translation, might also be attributed to this circle. It survives today in the College of Arms and was described by the late M.R. James as a monument to the study of Greek in thirteenth century England. Grosseteste did something to remedy the lack of teachers and books and his coincidence in time with the Latin occupation of the Aegean should not be dismissed lightly. He certainly inspired Roger Bacon (c. 1214-92), who regarded him as a pioneer in Greek studies, to produce a Greek grammar in the 1270s and to emphasise the importance of the Greek Fathers to theological studies, but both men were ahead of their times.

Id., p. 301:

This interest [in Greek history] did not extend to the preservation of ancient statuary about which attitudes were ambivalent. The magnificent group of gilded bronze horses were brought back to grace the facade of the basilica of San Marco but the bronze statues of pagan deities were melted down for small change. As Professor Setton has emphasized, the first aesthetic eulogy of a classical site from a western pen was written by Pedro IV of Aragon in 1388 when he described the Acropolis as 'the most precious jewel there is in the world' (la plus richa joya qui al mont sia). The king had never seen the Acropolis but was clearly moved by the accounts of those of his subjects like John Boyl who had.

Beastliness

Hello Mike,

I very much enjoyed the vigorous advice on bringing up young men dispensed
by the bishop of London ('Punishment in school' 22 Oct.). The reference to
'beastliness' as warranting an immediate thrashing perhaps needs a
scholion, given that the euphemism has entirely disappeared from the
language. It is, I assume, an allusion to "the secret vice which gets hold
of so many fellows. It is called in our schools 'beastliness', and that is
about the best name for it". (R. Baden-Powell, Scouting for boys (7th ed.
London 1915) p.196, under the heading of 'Continence'. The 7th ed. is
available at archive.org (http://bit.ly/2zA3ELh); first ed. was 1908.)

Sunday, November 05, 2017

Reform

The old woman sat in her rush-bottom'd chair,
And she snorted and sniff'd with her nose in the air;
"Dear me! dear me!
What's this?" quoth she;
"Here's a very bad smell; why, what can it be?
I'll wager a hat
It's that horrid Tom cat
Has been on the rug, or the carpet, or mat;
All this has been
From his being shut in.
Betty, go run for Carpenter Gore,
Make him cut a great hole by the sill of the door,
And the cat will get out and annoy us no more."

Straight at the little old woman's command
Came Carpenter Gore with his saw in his hand,
And he saw'd and he chisel'd, and close by the floor
He cut a great hole by the sill of the door;
And the little old woman began for to snore,
For now, without doubt,
As the cat could get out,
She conceived he would "never do so any more."
But when she awoke
She was ready to choke;
Oh dear! how she wheez'd
And snuff'd and sneez'd,
For the smell was a hundred times worse than before.

The old woman bann'd and the old woman swore,
And she vented her spite upon Carpenter Gore;
But Carpenter Gore cared little for that,
He put up his saw and he put on his hat,
And to Betty he said with a grin:
"A hole, no doubt,
That lets one cat out
Will let half a score cats in!"

MORAL.
Little old women, wherever ye be,
Gentle or simple, come listen to me—
Beware how you storm,
And bawl for Reform,
And great alterations begin,
Lest, in going about,
To rout one grievance out,
You let half a score come in.